Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Translate your Strategy Into Action!
Continuous improvement, rely on continuous measurement! As a soloist, you need to assess your performance, and how could you better do this without using Balanced Scorecard?!
There are many ways for performance measurement. Among them Balanced Scorecard is a scientific method which has been greatly implemented. So widely accepted and effective has the Scorecard become that the Harvard Business Review hailed it as one of the 75 most influential ideas of the twentieth century.
We can describe the Balanced Scorecard as a carefully selected set of quantifiable measures derived from an organization's strategy. The measures selected for the Scorecard represent a tool for leaders to use in communicating to employees and external stakeholders the outcomes and performance drivers by which the organization will achieve its mission and strategic objectives.
The Balanced Scorecard is a powerful tool that enables any organization to pinpoint and track the vital few variables that make or break performance. While originally designed in 1990 as a measurement system, the Balanced Scorecard has evolved into a Strategic Management System and powerful communication tool for those organizations fully utilizing its many capabilities. By linking the Scorecard to key management processes such as budgeting, compensation, and alignment, solo entrepreneurs can overcome the barriers to implementing their strategy.
You might ask how Balanced Scorecard does all this.
The answer is: Alignment.
Balanced Scorecard allows a Soloist to translate the vision and strategies of his enterprise by providing a new framework, one that tells the story of the organization's strategy through the objectives and measures chosen. Rather than focusing on financial control devices that provide little in the way of guidance for long-term employee decision-making, the Scorecard uses measurement as a new language to describe the key elements in the achievement of the strategy. The use of measurement is critical to the achievement of strategy.
Balanced Scorecard studies and aligns the organization within four perspectives: financial, Customer, Internal Processes, and Learning and Growth.
Whether using Balanced Scorecard or not, keep track of your performance. To be a successful soloist, you need to be really good at what you do!
Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, "The Balanced Scorecard—Measures That Drive Performance," Harvard Business Review, January-February 1992: pp. 71-79.
Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, The Balanced Scorecard (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996).
Peter I. Hupalo, Thinking Like An Entrepreneur
Timothy J. Galpin, Making Strategy Work (San Francisco, CA, Jossey-Bass, 1997).
